How can I copy a VHD of my boot drive back to this boot drive?

[TechnoMax]

Half a dozen of my personal udates to Windows Fall Creators Update 1709 were successful, physical and virtual machines, new ones and even a netbook. But my main rig cannot be updated (I tried it several times following all the advice I could find for this case). It ends with a simple error message but with no specific error code.

But to my total surprise a VHD that I made from my physical Windows 1703 system drive could be updated to 1709. Now I want to copy this VHD back to my physical machine of course.
But how? Obviously I need a programm that can produce a bootable USB stick and that then converts the VHD or a backup of it made by itself or another programm back to the system partion of my computer.

Which software would be appropriate for this task?

[socratis]

I would suggest to try your favorite search engine for "Virtual to physical". I've done the opposite, P2V (as you too from my understanding) but not the V2P, so I can't suggest something specific.

[BillG]

I am trying to work out how VirtualBox comes into this. How did you create the .vhd file from your physical drive? How did you then manage to boot from it and run the upgrade? Did you create a VirtualBox vm using the .vhd and run the upgrade in that guest? I would be pretty surprised if that worked because of the different "hardware" of a VirtualBox vm.

You certainly do not need a bootable USB stick. The only way, as socratis suggested, would be to use V2P software to convert your virtual drive to a physical drive and boot from that.

[TechnoMax]

for the virtualization of my windows I tried several programms. And I tried different conversions to use them either in VirtualBox or VM Ware Player. I think i finally used disk2vhd. VirtualBox can work with VHDs. And as a bootable system guest it was possible to update to 1709. This came not as a big surprise to me because you can easily install Windows and now 1709 in a guest box.

I never used P2V or equivalent software except virtualization of older Windows PCs for future use. XP in Windows 7, Windows 7 in Windows 10. But I do not see how the other way round can be made if you do not boot from a third device, a bootable Stick with the software for conversion on it: The Source drive (USB) has the VHD, the target drive is the main SSD in the PC, and the third drive handles the conversion. How else?

[socratis]

The audience in these forums deals mostly with virtualization. A small percentage has done P2V (including myself), mainly with Disk2VHD and then mostly CloneVDI to convert the VHD to a native VDI. I don't think I've seen anyone dealing with the opposite conversion, V2P, so the answers to your question might be scarce. Just something to keep in mind...

[TechnoMax]

"I don't think I've seen anyone dealing with the opposite conversion, V2P"

This I learned too. I have asked my questions in 5 different forums, with hundreds of views in total, but only here I caught the start of an answer.

[socratis]

You could try the old way, where you install a backup software in the guest and then you restore the backup to the host. Expect "problems" in the drivers area, but as long as you have a reasonably new guest, the plug-and-play should take care of that.

[TechnoMax]

This I tried already. But it did not work. The drivers would have been no problem. I had made a special backup with double driver. But I could not even boot it however hard I tried. Then I capitulated and installed 1709 afresh.

[BillG]

A wise decision.

[TechnoMax]

The "new" Windows has the big advantage that it is quite small now. I installed only the essentials, the rest stays in the VHD of the old installation. As I only make full backups this really saves space and time. With 16GB RAM I even can afford to let it run idle even if I do not "need" a specific app.

[mpack]

I agree with BillG. Technically a migration uses the same techniques whether it is P2V, V2P, P2P or V2V. The problems greatly depend on how far apart source and dest PCs are in hardware terms, and a VirtualBox VM is very far from any physical PC you're likely to encounter. A fresh install was by far the better bet.

[TechnoMax]

Recently I successfully "copied" my Windows 10 installation from an Intel NUC to a Windows tablet. I used AOMEI Backupper and DoubleDriver. In this case it workes like a charm despite quite considerable diffenrences in hardware too. Therefore I hoped that a way back form a P2V virtual machine to exact this physical machine would be as easy. But it was not, unfortunately.

[socratis]

I used AOMEI Backupper and DoubleDriver.

So what if you use the same programs?

it workes like a charm despite quite considerable diffenrences in hardware too.

Look a P2V and a V2P is definitely possible. Just look at all the people that are using an installation as a Physical system as well as a Virtual system; I'm thinking mainly of the BootCamp users that are booting from a partition, or can use the same exact installation (with rawdisk access to the partition) as a Virtual Machine. The differences in the hardware are definitely huge. I'm doing it with an external Win10 hard drive as well. I can either boot my real Mac, or I can have it attached as a VM. No problemo...


<unrelated>
Come to think of it the only thing I haven't tried is to boot my other x86 computer from that Win10 USB drive. Hmm...
</unrelated>

[TechnoMax]

Yes, in the Mac-world it is easier (That one can have a bootable OS X drive at hand on a external harddrive is something I always envied as a Windows man). I once had a Mac mini wich I used with Parallels for Windows, as I did not use Mac OS. And very soon moved over to a Bootcamp Windows. But finally I went back to the "real" Windows world I am used to for ages and sold my Mac.
In my attempt of V2P I used AOMEI too of course ( I have backups of Macrium Reflect and O&O too, but I am used to AOMEI). But as I wrote already, to my surprise I went wrong. I started with a clean Windows 10 Pro 1709 install in order to get the proper partition layout and then restored the System partition of the AOMEI backup only. But then the PC could not boot anymore and every rescue attempt with windows repair options failed.
Edit: As a last attempt I deleted all Windows partitions on the boot drive and once again restored my VHD backup. The same: It simply did not work.

[socratis]

That one can have a bootable OS X drive at hand on a external harddrive is something I always envied as a Windows man

It's not an OSX thing. It used to be a Mac (as in hardware) thing, but these days and for the last 10 years at least, other PC manufacturers have enabled that booting from an external hard drive capability. I have a 12-year old ASUS PC that allows me to boot from a USB stick. If yours can't do it, you might want to check its expiration date...

As far as the backup/restore procedure, I don't have a clue what you're doing exactly in terms of disks/partitions, so I can't comment on that. You might have to ask them or search in their forums. I did however found a quote the other day that seems appropriate:

Schrödinger's Backup
The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted.